A federal judge has ruled in favor of a transgender man who was denied a passport card after being told he needed to provide medical documentation confirming his gender transition.
Oliver Bruce Morris, a Nevada resident, applied for a passport in October 2018 and selected “M” for his gender marker. Morris already had a driver’s license with an accurate gender marker from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and sought out a passport card because it’s permitted for travel to Canada and Mexico, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. While passport books allow individuals to travel outside North America, they are twice as expensive, according to the U.S. Department of State website.
Even with the corrected ID Morris submitted as part of the application, the State Department turned him away, sending a letter asking him to verify his sex.
But in a ruling issued last week, Judge Gloria M. Navarro of the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada ordered the federal government to review Morris’s passport card application without requiring a doctor’s certification of his gender identity. If the passport application meets all other requirements, Navarro wrote, then the State Department needs to issue Morris a 10-year passport, which would include an accurate gender marker.
“If Plaintiff were cisgender, he would not have to verify his gender identity beyond the submission of consistent identification corroborating his gender,” Navarro wrote in a 19-page ruling. “Therefore, the policy discriminates against Plaintiff on the basis of his transgender status.”
The decision only applies to Morris’s case, however. Navarro wrote that the court’s decision “should in no way be construed to mean that the State Department cannot meet its burden to justify the Policy requiring a doctor’s certification of gender for transgender passport applicants.” Instead, in this particular incident, the department failed to meet its burden in responding to Morris’s challenge on the basis of the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection rights.
“There is little doubt that the State Department has an interest in accurately representing the identities of U.S. citizens to foreign nations. However, the only facet of identity at issue here is a passport applicant’s sex or gender,” Navarro wrote in her opinion, adding that the government “has provided no explanation, let alone any evidence, of why the State Department has an important interest in verifying a transgender passport applicant’s gender identity, nor a cogent explanation of why the Policy requiring a physician’s certification increases the accuracy of issued passports.”
It’s not yet clear whether or not the State Department will appeal the ruling.
In an interview when the lawsuit was originally filed, Morris said he was surprised when he was denied a passport.
“I didn’t expect it at all, because I do have my change of name and everything, and my driver’s license says what it says,” Morris told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “But because my birth certificate still has the female gender on it, they’re attesting to that and not what the current status of everything is.”
Morris added that he was galvanized by the lawsuit’s potential to help other people and that it could also help his loved ones realize the barriers trans people encounter to have their identities respected. Currently, only 19 states and the District of Columbia currently allow people to choose between M, F, and X markers on their driver’s licenses and state IDs, according to the Movement Advancement Project.
The vast majority of those states use forms that are easy to understand and don’t require any certification of gender identity from a medical provider, but in many states, transgender and non-binary people face additional legal hurdles to obtaining official identity documents updated to reflect their gender identity. Nine states — including Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, and Texas — mandate proof of surgery, a court order, or other requirements before an individual is permitted to change the gender marker on their official documentation.
“[M]aybe, with my voice being heard, then maybe my family will see it and have a better understanding and see how personal this all is for me,” Morris said. “That I’m a person. That I’m a human. That I’m myself. That I’m Oliver.”
The ruling in Nevada follows other recent court victories that affirm the right of transgender people to obtain identity documents with their correct names and gender markers.
In December 2019, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that a judge couldn’t deny a transgender individual’s request for a name change for “failure to show cause” that they wanted legal documents to reflect their gender identity. Meanwhile, in June, a Idaho judge ruled that it’s illegal for the state to prevent trans people from correcting their birth certificates. And in response to a federal lawsuit, the state of New York last month disclosed its plans to permit residents to receive gender-neutral driver’s licenses through an automated application process.
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